Moments Outside Time
by Kefalion
Summary: Harry is led to a strange place in the Forbidden Forest by a strange bird. It happens several times, and in another time, parallel to Harry's, another student is led by the same strange bird to the same strange place. They find comfort in each other.


This story was written for the **Seventh Round **of the Seventh Season of the Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition. I'm writing as **Chaser 2 **for **The Tutshill Tornados**.

Name of the round: Not My Department

The task of Chaser 2: Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures: Write about an encounter with a wild animal, beast, creature, etc

These are the prompts I'm using as a chaser to score some extra points:

3\. (object) newspaper  
6\. (color) lemon yellow  
14\. (quote) "You and I, we are a moment in time, a spark in the universe that can never be duplicated."- Mary Jo Schwartz

**Disclaimer:** I don't own any part of the world J.K. Rowling has created. It's all hers, from Diagon Alley to Hogwarts to all the people living there.

Thanks to the Tutshill Tornados for betaing!

WARNING: AU fifth year. Present tense.

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**Moments Outside Time  
**_Words: 2 996_

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Because of Umbridge, Harry isn't allowed to play Quidditch. He can't even fly on his broom as it's locked away in her office. The restriction can't keep him away from the Quidditch pitch though. Harry sometimes goes there to watch the Gryffindor team practice, torturing himself with looking at what he can't have. Sometimes, he goes there simply seeking solitude.

On one such night, Harry huddles in the top part of the bleachers. He has his scarf wrapped high, so it covers everything right up to his glasses and one of Hermione's knitted hats pulled low over his head. The wind bites at every inch of skin left exposed, and the air glistens with sparse flakes of snow. Nevertheless, Harry cherishes being there, being away from everyone and their expectations, their hurtful words, and their ever-present judgment.

Flapping wildly in the harsh wind, a blackbird seats itself on one of the seats a row down. It ruffles its feathers, turning into a beaked feather-ball, and tilts its head, peering at Harry with intelligent pinprick eyes.

"Hi," he says, voice muffled by his scarf and torn away by the wind.

The bird trills a series of quick notes, jumps back to another seat, and trills again. It does the same thing another time. And another. It jumps up and down, flapping its wings without taking flight while its whistling turns harsher.

"Do you want something?"

It sings one long note, _yes, _and jumps further away, still backwards.

Frowning and wondering why he's obeying the directions of some strange bird, briefly thinking that it can be an Animagus, Harry rises. It whistles lightly, happily, and takes to the air. It flies like no bird Harry has ever seen. It flies backwards. The tail end is first, the head back, watching Harry while it flies away, wings almost paddling in the air, doing a round motion rather than the normal up and down.

Harry stares, mouth agape, earning him a tongue covered in wool.

The bird turns around, flying towards him. It lands, turns its head over its shoulder, gives him a look, and whistles indignantly.

"Sorry. Didn't mean to stare. You're no ordinary blackbird, are you?"

It cocks his head as if to say _obviously not_.

"Right."

It jumps to another seat, and another, as it had done before, and Harry gets the message.

He follows it away from the Quidditch pitch, away from the castle, and to the Forbidden Forest. The wind whooshes in the trees, making them sway so much he's sure every other one will break and fall down on top of him. The forest is dangerous at the best of times. In this gale, it seems outright hazardous. It's stupid to follow an unknown creature into the woods—he should know better.

He stops walking and looks back to see the lights in the many windows of the castle. A little bit farther, and they'll no longer be visible.

The blackbird isn't having it with Harry's delay. It goes to him and scratches lightly at his shoulder. Having regained his attention, it resumes its intended path into the forest.

With a bemused smile, Harry shrugs off his hesitancy. This is far from the most reckless thing he's done, and he's curious. He wants to see where the bird will take him. With a bit of luck, this visit might not go like all the others have. He might end up somewhere nice, not stumbling across unicorn corpses or Acromantula nests.

He treks on.

As he walks deeper beneath the dense boughs, darkness falls like a heavy blanket, the bright yellow of the bird's beak and claws the only things he can see clearly. The musty smell of humus fills his nose, and wet mud seeps into his shoes, chilling his feet. The blackbird trills encouragingly to him every few minutes, noticing that Harry longs to turn back, to be at dinner in the castle, munching on some rich stew and drinking pumpkin juice while chatting with Ron and Hermione.

Harry is about to damn his curiosity and try to find his way back when everything changes. The thunderous whooshing of the wind in the trees disappears. The temperature shoots up from just over freezing to pleasantly warm. The odour of decaying plant-matter dissipates to give way to the smell of grass, flowers, and sun-warmed pine, and it turns bright. He blinks rapidly to get used to the light and pulls his scarf away from his face.

He's in a vast meadow with a floor covered in fragrant grasses and flowers. Trees that can only be seen through a haze stand like sentinels around the open space, making a perfect circle. There's no sky overhead, just a luminous lemon-yellow expanse that spreads its light to everything below.

Seeing the bird here, Harry notices that its claws and beak are the exact shade of the not-sky, unlike the warmer, earthier yellow of normal blackbirds. It flies to the middle of the meadow where there's a large, smooth slab of stone and a pool of clear water. It lands on the stone, next to a rolled-up newspaper.

Harry sits down next to it. "Is this your home? It's very nice. But I don't understand why you wanted to bring me here."

The lemon-yellow beaked blackbird doesn't respond. It folds its wings together and tucks its head under a wing, going to sleep. With a shake of his head and a smile, Harry leaves it alone and picks up the paper.

It is a copy of the Daily Prophet dated to _Sunday 20th September 1942_. The headline's about the Muggle War. Other articles in the paper handled more mundane matters: the latest scores in the Quidditch League, the opening of a new store in Diagon Alley, and the rising price on Ministry certified cauldrons.

It's interesting reading, but not something Harry has the patience to pay attention to for long. Grinning over the fact that Hermione would have his head for defacing a historical document, he pulls out a fountain pen and starts to scribble. Drawing a funny moustache on one of the German officers seems like a perfectly noble thing to do. It takes a bit of an effort as the man tries to escape the end of his pen by stepping out of frame, but Harry gets him.

There's no indication of passing time in this place, and the watch Harry still wears has been broken since the second task of the Triwizard Tournament, but he needs neither the sun nor a clock to know that it's time he heads back.

It's just so nice here, and the blackbird has the right idea. A nap would feel good. Harry pulls off his scarf, folds it, and uses it as a pillow as he lies down in the grass. He will only rest his eyes for a moment.

—

When Harry wakes up, he's in his bed in Gryffindor Tower, with no memory of how he got back to the Castle, and his scarf's missing.

At breakfast, he tells Ron and Hermione all about it, and they, after scolding him, decide to see if they can find the meadow together.

They can't.

They walk around the forest for hours, getting more and more lost. The Marauder's Map doesn't cover more than the edges of the Forbidden Forest, and point me spells aren't much help as they'd not kept track of which direction they'd started out in.

Hagrid ends up finding them, Fang bounding from his side to slobber all over first Harry, then Ron.

"What are yeh three doing in here?" Hagrid says in a fake-hushed voice that isn't the least bit quiet.

Harry dries off his hands on the bottom part of his cloak. "We were trying to find this meadow that a bird led me to. It looked like a blackbird, but I don't think it was one."

"Lemon-yellow beak and claws? Flew backwards?"

"Yes, exactly!"

"That's an Oozlum Bird. If an Oozlum led you to its nest, you won' find it again on yer own."

"Oh."

"Why not?" Hermione asks, deftly side-stepping Fang.

"They build their nests in a place outside time. Yeh can't go there without them opening the way, and they only allow certain people. If one liked you, Harry, it won't approach you as long as you have company. Each bird likes a few select people and hides away from all others. It's got to do with magic. They steal stuff from people with the right type of magic. Did yeh lose anything, Harry?"

"My Gryffindor scarf."

"You won' be gettin' that back!" Hagrid chuckles. "I lost my fair share of things to an Oozlum some years back. My favourite pair of shears for one. Never mind that. I should be gettin' you back to Hogwarts. And I'll have to deduct points for this. The Forbidden Forest is... forbidden."

They all raised their eyebrows at him. Ron says, "You're really going to take points from us?"

Hagrid pulls his shoulders back, determined. "Three points from Gryffindor."

Their unimpressed expressions don't go away.

Hagrid turns sheepish. "Each?"

—

Mere days later, the Oozlum finds Harry again, and his resolution to ignore it lasts only so long. He doesn't want to hurt it, nor does he want to have his eyes pecked out, so doing as it wants seems like the best way to avoid either outcome. Besides, the night after he went to the Oozlum nest, he slept the best he has in ages. He'd like to know if it had to do with the bird or if it was a coincidence.

The meadow appears unchanged. The atmosphere is calm and beautiful, and the emptiness above is as blindingly lemon-coloured as he remembers. Like the previous time, the Oozlum flies to the stone-slab and goes to sleep, this time on top of Harry's scarf. Next to it, the newspaper lies, and it's joined by one of the bird's feathers. No, not just any feather—a quill. And there's writing on the newspaper. Harry picks it up.

_I can't decide if he looks better or not with the moustache. The Colonel isn't an easy target to beautify, _it says, with an arrow pointed at the German Officer. And scribbled under it, _Look at what I drew on page 7._

Harry flips the pages to a small picture of a young Dumbledore. He's been given angry eyebrows, devil horns, and a matching tail. The Dumbledore in the picture seems to be enjoying them, flicking the tail and wiggling the eyebrows, matching the expression by viciously baring his teeth, then breaking the act by shaking with silent mirth.

Harry smiles, digs out a bottle of ink from his bag, and uses the quill that had been left behind. _Nice, _he writes_, but not fully true to character. _He casts a couple of charms on the picture, turning the black and white photograph to colour. He makes the horns and tail bright red and the robes pink. It clashes horribly, especially with the addition of auburn in the hair and beard. It's exactly to Dumbledore's taste.

He writes a bit more in the margin. _So, I'm not the only one the Oozlum likes. It's nice to know that I'm not alone._

He'd like to know who this other person is, but asking who it is feels a bit presumptuous. It's not like he wants to reveal his own name. Maybe later, if this continues, he'll ask, willing to share his own name.

Feeling drowsy, he settles down in the grass. Before he closes his eyes, he looks accusingly at the bird.

"This is your magic making me tired, isn't it?"

It lets out a low, sleepy whistle.

"Don't steal any of my books, please. I'd hate having to get new ones right before the winter exams. Though, I guess you can have the book Umbridge assigned."

—

Harry sits down next to the bird and the growing pile of stolen items. Beside his scarf, he's lost his broken watch, a sock, a bag of owl candy, and the enchanted knife Sirius gave him for Christmas, and then there are the items the bird has taken from the newspaper-guy: the quill, a clothes tag that says _Wool's Orphanage_, a Prefect badge, a jumper in Slytherin Colours, and a box of candied pineapple.

Harry pets the bird as he would Hedwig, a single finger stroking from the head and down the back. "You shouldn't look like a blackbird," he mutters. "You should look like a magpie. Those are the birds known for their thievery. You're a very picky thief, though, and a cute one—I'll give you that."

The Oozlum opens a single eye, sings a short little melody and goes back to sleep.

Both Harry and the Oozlum's other target have been trying to leave letters to better communicate, but no letters have stayed, so they're stuck writing in the newspaper which has little white space left in it.

Through their limited means of correspondence, they've managed to understand that they're both fifth-year students, but not attending Hogwarts at the same time. The things they've lost have also made their houses apparent. The newspaper-guy is a Slytherin, and he writes from the 1940s, endlessly inquisitive about the future. Harry's not willing to tell him much. He's got a healthy fear of meddling with time. He's content to share tiny titbits, and talk about mundane things.

Not wanting to think about politics or the war was what had led to him meeting the Oozlum in the first place, and because the bird won't leave him alone when he wants a break from everything, he takes his breaks here in the meadow, meaning that he won't think or write about Voldemort to some student from fifty years ago. But he does talk about Defence Against the Dark Arts, which they have a shared passion for.

Harry's_—_friend?_—_is appropriately appalled by Umbridge when Harry tells him and gives some book recommendations based on what he's learned from the teacher in his time. Some of the books are readily available in the library, some have been moved to the Restricted Section, and some can't be found there either. Time definitely changes some things. It's amazing how they can exist in a moment outside of time, speaking across the years. For all that Harry's annoyed with the thieving bird, he's also deeply grateful.

—

Harry closes his eyes, about to fall asleep. He allows it to happen, safe in the knowledge that when he wakes, he'll be in his bed in Gryffindor Tower no worse for wear, and as he sleeps, no bad dreams will torment him. For a time, he will be allowed to forget that Sirius has died, and that Voldemort has openly returned. Perhaps he'll not even have anything stolen from him, but instead, be allowed to keep the Slytherin's golden pocket watch that he's tucked away inside his robes. Though, he wouldn't mind if the bird stole one of his notebooks. The newspaper is ridiculously cluttered with their messages.

The Oozlum, which had disappeared rather than going directly to sleep, swoops down, and with its return comes the sound of grass and dry leaves crunching under a pair of shoes.

Harry snaps from drowsy to alert in a split second. His jaw grows loose and his eyes widen at the sight. It's his bloody luck. Too handsome to be allowed and too despicable to be Harry's new friend, Tom Riddle stands before him in the lemon-yellow light of the meadow, a soft smile on his face.

Harry's surprise doesn't last long, morphing to intense self-loathing at how he could have missed it. Everything fits. Oozlums like people with certain types of magic. Harry's connected to Voldemort, to his magic. The newspaper-guy is an orphan in the 1940s, a prefect, and a Slytherin.

Loathing gives way to anger. All Harry can think of is that Bellatrix, that Voldemort, that _Riddle _is responsible for Sirius' death. With blood pounding through his ears, drowning out Riddle's friendly, "Hello! You must be the one who's been coming here these past months. It's good to finally meet you," Harry gets to his feet, hands fisted, and before he could think it through, he punches Riddle right in his pretty teeth.

Riddle's top lip splits open against Harry's knuckles, blood oozing sluggishly. Riddle wipes it away, spitting out some that got into his mouth. He speaks calmly, his voice cold, "That's not how I imagine our first meeting going, but to you, it's not the first time we've met, is it? No one hates someone they've never met this much. You know me. Or the man I grow into. You know Lord Voldemort."

Harry whips out his wand, pushing it into Riddle's jugular. "I should kill you. You're already a murderer, aren't you? Has the basilisk killed Myrtle yet?"

Contrary to his expectations, Riddle pales. "She dies? When? What day?"

"I don't know."

"Let me go. I can still stop it. I don't actually want anyone to die. I just…" He doesn't finish the sentence.

"I don't trust you."

"Maybe not, but what does it hurt to chance? If I do what I say I will, a girl will live. If not—it already happened from your perspective, didn't it? Killing damages the soul. I've read about it. I don't think I want that. If that leads to a road where people look at me like you do, I don't want that. Maybe this moment, this meeting between us is what changes everything. Let me go."

Harry lowers his wand. "Time-travel doesn't work like that."

"And you know everything about magic, do you? Let me go stop the basilisk."

Harry nods. "Go then."

Tom Riddle hurries away, disappearing back through the haze at the edge of the meadow, and Harry's left wondering if he made the biggest mistake of his life or if he's saved the wizarding world.

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**The End**

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**A/N 13th July 2019:**

I was self-indulgent in the last round, writing about my favourite characters, but then, I was actually inspired by the prompt to do so. This round, I picked my characters first, and then chose my prompt to fit. I wanted to write for me. I believe that if I like what I'm doing, the story will reflect that and be good. Though, all you lovely readers will have to decide if my belief is right or not.

Oozlum birds (or Ouzlum) are legendary birds from British and Australian folklore. There are a few different takes on them, all agreeing that the birds fly backwards, but not agreeing on why. Might be that they fly in smaller and smaller circles until they disappear inside themselves, or they're just navigately challenged, so though they never know where they're going, they like to know where they've been. The word might be a derivative of ouzel, which means black bird.


End file.
